Listening to him, the transition to directing came naturally for Alex Lutz, who signs his fourth film with A night which comes out Wednesday July 5th. He recounts a brief but intense meeting with Karin Viard, who wanders with him all night in Paris. The comedian, actor and director signs a poetic and inhabited romance of which he gives us the manufacturing secrets in a nocturnal interview.
Franceinfo Culture: I liked your film because this love story is incredible. I saw there a parable about the actor, a film about his power to make us believe the implausible. Was it intentional?
Alex Lutz: It’s not wrong, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s nice what you send back to me. No, that was not my intention, but I really like this proposal. These characters (Alex Lutz and Karin Viard) play with the night, this couple plays with the history of their reciprocal couple, yes, they have this side which consists in playing at something. This invites the spectators to be on their shoulders, immersed and to believe in them. And it’s nice to believe in fictions.
At times, the film is deliberately acted out, in an almost theatrical tone.
Yes, it is linked to what the story tells, the ins and outs of which cannot be revealed. It’s like a marivaudage, we are in seduction, the couple. There is also this succession of masks, even if they are sometimes very complicit. We wear them each and every one and sometimes in pairs, voluntarily or involuntarily. Yes of course it is also a film about the game.
You wrote and produced A night with Karin Viard, so it’s a joint project, how did it come about?
Karin is credited with writing, and we are co-producers, but it was Didar Domehri who actually produced the film. As for the writing, it is by me and Hadrien Bichet. Finally, before filming, Karin got involved in writing the final versions of the text. The project was born following an argument in the subway which I attended. This argument had charm and I imagined this embrace that follows it. I had the idea in my notebooks for years. And when I met Karin, we got along very well and we wanted to write a film for her, and with her. I found this story to be great and that it was intended for him.
Your nocturnal Paris is a character in its own right, very well photographed and atmospheric. How did you choose it?
It was Eponine Momenceau, the director of photography, who did an incredible job. I wanted Paris to be like a garment. There are no big wide shots, we guess it, he’s in front, he’s behind us, he’s like a simple little backdrop. I wanted the lower 16th arrondissement, because I find it a bit suspended. Even during the day it’s not overcrowded, and I knew it wouldn’t be noisy at night. It’s a bit unchanging too, it looks like the Porte de Saint-Cloud is still the same age, the axes are a bit wider than elsewhere, I wanted to go that way. The night shoot was very stressful. There had to be urgency, with few nights of filming, to match the urgency of the characters. And having turned in the summer, the nights were short. The fatigue had to show.
We identify you with comedy. How did you come up with a romance?
Among my films made, guy is not a hilarious movie, Vortex (Gaspar Noé), where I play, either. In the cinema, I didn’t really do comedies, it’s not my identity in the cinema. My humorous identity is on stage, and there too there are poetic and sometimes moving encounters. The humor is in Catherine and Liliane, but in the cinema, comedy is not my favorite genre, even if I like it. And if tomorrow, I am offered a good comedy, I will play it with pleasure.
There is a real work of staging in the film, of construction, of temporality. Explain these choices
I wanted us to find ourselves in the present of that night and in its potential memory. Like a sleepless night, when you remember it, you don’t remember the continuity of the flow of things, or where and how the conversations took place. I wanted to rediscover this somewhat fluffy temporality. It’s curious to remember a sleepless night, you don’t necessarily put things in their place. I wanted to find that confusion.
How do you navigate in a film you’re making?
When you have the image in your head, a story in your head, it’s not insurmountable, it’s not schizophrenic. Strangely, you should not stay focused on yourself, but on others. It’s almost a vacation when you drop the directing side, and play on set. You are then abandoned to the other, you are on your partner’s shoulder, it is very pleasant to abandon yourself to your partner when you are directing a film that you have written. Suddenly, it’s a second coat of varnish, it’s a second writing. On the other hand, I don’t like to check on the combo (control screen), what we have done or not. You also have to trust your teams, everyone has to be responsible for their actions on set. When I know that a scene is framed correctly, when we agree on the point, we have to go for it. The cinema is a small box in which you do theater and act.
There is a big ellipse at the start of the film, after the argument in the metro, since we find you in the next shot with Karin Viard in a photo booth making love. Did you cut during the editing, or was this brutal transition written?
There was a little wandering between them in the corridors of the subway, where they approached slowly, but I didn’t like that. I found it necessary to be clear, to go to the bone of what she will say next, “we argued six minutes and we fucked the other six, here we go“. This line was in the script, you just had to respect it and be direct. It was originally written with this ellipse. I like the ellipsis, because the viewer co-writes with you to fill in the blanks. It her little kitchen, her little story, Catherine and Liliane are devilishly elliptical characters. We feel like we know their house in Meudon, we never see their legs, we don’t see their husbands, or their canteen, and we have a crazy imagination around. guy was based on a large ellipse, since it was a 75-year-old singer, of whom the spectator knew nothing. Spectators like to play such bets, so you have to play with them.
What is your cinephilia? We think of brief encounter by David Lean in A nightsince this love between Aymeric and Nathalie could also be a fantasy.
I thought of several things, not necessarily films, but music, musical fugues on the piano, which appear as additional music in the film, like Tchaikovsky, or the Prelude and Variations by Cesar Frank. I loved in Kramer versus Kramer the mandolin concerto that opens the film, like a ritornello. I also thought of Who’s Afraid of Virginia WoolfTo Turning Point (The Turn of Life), A man I like… Otherwise, I have a great cinephilia, from Spielberg to Eisenstein.
How did you go from music hall to directing?
I have always staged. When I had my theater company subsidized, out of necessity, to earn a living, I put on my plays, I wrote rather than buying rights, because it was cheaper. And there is a connection with the cinema, it’s close. As I staged for the theatre, I never really asked myself the question of moving on to something else, only that of continuing my job.